Ultimate Image!

I'm so so happy with how my hoverboard animation turned out, considering how awful it was to animating. (Two rigs, ugh) So I decided to use it in my ultimate image! 

And here's the final ULTIMATE image! 

Quick catch-up!

I've spent the last two months or so animating away and completely forgot to blog about the rest of the puppet making. So this is just a little catch up post. ^_^

The final performance is meant to involve a character interaction, which means two puppets! Below are photos of the hands half way through being made, along with a photo of one of the armatures. I was pretty happy with the hands, until I realised way way wayyy too late (while animating) that they were way too big for the puppets. Oops.

I carved and glued two bits of balsa wood around some k&s to start sculpting the characters heads. They're no where near perfect, but they're getting slightly better each time! (Look at the teeny ears!)

    

Making the hair out of FIMO is always my favourite part. Last year my character had crazy blue Princess Leia hair (which I made on May 4th. Best timing.) Below are photos of the heads with hair, and the padding for the girl character!

   

I took so many photos while making, but then I dropped my phone once or five times and the SD card got a teeny bit damaged, so tra photos...

Below are the puppet with their clothes! ^_^ 

So much sass. 

(Grand Budapest Hotel fans, does the cake look familiar?) 

The king of the swingers, the jungle VIP ^_^

To go with the explorer, I needed to make a monkey, which I was kind of dreading. I made a cat armature in first year, that ended up with spaghetti legs. I planned to needle felt it which was also scary! New things! Ahh! 

To make sure that the monkey armature didn't end up being too big I planned it all out on top of the armature design, with not much help from my cat...

K&S all glued in it's place! Then made sure that it kinda resembled a monkeys skeleton. It does. Kinda.

Added a sneaky little rig point under where the tail is going to be! I wrapped a thin bit of wire around the washer to create the tail.

Then the needle felting began! (Oh and I made hands and feet!)

Inside the head I glued a bit of foam to the wire to fill it up a bit. I decided to go with a light blue colour for the face/belly. Gives it more of a cartoony sort of look, rather than a realistic monkey. 

To make the ears I just stabbed a little ball of brown wool repeatedly, and then stabbed teeny bits of blue wool inside until I released all of my anger, I mean until the blue wool was felted into the brown...

Awww look at him with his ears! ^_^

I attempted to needle-felt the fingers, but it was so time consuming, and just looked a bit messy I ended up sewing felt around the wire instead. Looks much neater. :}

Finished monkey, hanging from my lamp. ^_^